The complementary use of IDEF and UML modelling approaches

The IDEF and Unified Modelling Language (UML) modelling approaches have become popular in industrial and academic circles. IDEF comprises a suite of graphical modelling techniques designed to formally specify and communicate important aspects of enterprise engineering projects, whereas UML is a modelling language that can be used to generate computer-executable models that encode key aspects of software engineering projects. This paper considers similarities and differences between IDEF and UML modelling approaches. It is observed that the combined development and reuse of IDEF and UML models has the potential to place information technology (IT) systems engineering projects into a wider context of enterprise engineering. An electronics industry case study is described to illustrate this observation. Particularly, this study illustrates how semantic information encoded by different types of IDEF diagramming technique can be re-represented and reused as models expressed in alternative notations. The study illustrates benefits gained from using IDEF as a business front end to UML. Further, it indicates how consistency can be maintained between multi-perspective models expressed in terms of general purpose IDEF and UML modelling constructs.